Worth Doing

My studio has been a mess lately because of this apron. Now that it's finished, I can get back to the other stuff that got back-burnered because I got a sudden urge to use up all this denim I recycled.



If you've been keeping up with me on Facebook, or more recently on Instagram, then you've seen all the in-progress images that I've been posting. There are a few you haven't seen, though. Namely the sashiko section I used to stabilize the lower hem. I've been pinning some images while researching Sashiko technique, and have found more decorative demonstrations than reinforcement stitching which is what I've tried to do here. I say "tried" because despite the gathering tendencies of spiral stitch, the edge still curls slightly. I think I'm just going to leave it curled. I plan on adding more stitching to other areas, but I want to get a few washings in first, and see how things develop.



The white thread is a 100% cotton recycled from a Façonnable men's sweater, and the black is a 100% silk recycled from a Banana Republic women's sweater. You may notice from those images that each garment was knit with a multi-strand structured yarn, so I had to separate each strand to use the thread individually.

This project was pretty hard. I could have used my sewing machine, but the beauty of hand stitching cannot be denied. And if you don't know me by now, then yes: I do hard things. They're worth doing. Now I think I'm going to clean up my workspace.

Just Make

So that denim I showed you the other day was sitting around within my field of vision the past week because I wanted to sew something out if it.

I don't know what to call this, but I'm currently using it as a mouse pad. The physical parameters indicate that it's a bag. That's fine. If I feel like sliding a piece of paper into it with web passwords, then so be it. If I want to use it as a divider inside another bag, fine. There's no specified purpose for this object. Making it was far more interesting to me.




Measure, cut, iron, stitch. It's like a creative meditation.

I Call Them Gaunts

I need to catch up with all these projects that I finished and never blogged about. These gaunts were completed around the end of last year, and I tucked them away like so many other personal projects. They're a simple improvisational project with more experimenting than planning. Color block stripes, spiral jog stripes, and an angular transition thrown in for good measure. That's really all there is going on here.

The yarn is a 100% Scottish Shetland wool recycled from a beat up sweater that I never took a picture of before unravelling. It was destroyed. I remember there were so many breaks in the yarn that I had to repair every few feet with a russian join. I almost gave up, but at the time this was the only light and medium gray yarns I had. I still have a few ziploc bags full of short strands that I kept. Maybe I should make a pin cushion with some of it (I've been saying that for years).

Delete Bravo

As you may recall from the Alpha, "Delete" is a designation I've developed to essentially bust my stash. And if you know me well enough by now, you'd know that I'd never name a scarf something so obvious as "Stashbuster" or whatever because that would be stupid.

The names I give to my work have very specific origins. The hats are named after tools and processes in Adobe Illustrator. The scarves: Photoshop. The sweater I just finished was named after a command in InDesign. Of course, I follow these naming guidelines somewhat loosely, but it gives me a good foundation for the thought process. This is, after all, about design. None of this is about knitting.



I suppose it's worth knowing that this yarn came from the first sweater I ever recycled back into yarn. I never even took a picture of the original sweater. This was back in 2010 when I was first learning how to knit, and consequently learning the prices of modern yarn. That's when I saw the necessity of it. I remember being skeptical of the whole yarn recycling process, but the thought of spending time rather than money appealed to my good sense.



So here I am, busting stash. Half of it, anyway. Maybe I should just make another one. Delete Bravo is an improvisational knit. The only preparation I did was a general gauge swatch, and a few mathematical equations to govern the potential variety of stitch patterns. The stitch pattern repeats essentially duplicate themselves from two to four to eight, while the angular transitions divide the compositions into sections of sixteen and thirty-two: 2 4 8 16 32. The consistency of the math unifies all the visual elements quite well, with the eight stitch sections fitting puzzle-like atop pairs of four stitch repeats. I like how this turned out.

Place Alpha Zero

After writing up a heavily technical post filled with knitting jargon and shop talk, it occurred to me that those of you that would understand it would just be hearing what you already know: calculations can only take you part of the way, but you have to dive in and just do it if you want to see how well a project will turn out.

When I bought Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Without Tears a while back from Amazon, there was this customer review on there that still bugs the crap out of me to this day. The customer bashed the book for not giving step by step instructions or tables for the percentage system, and how Zimmermann's conversational approach to patterns was basically inappropriate.

But that's not what knitting is about, is it? That's not what knitting is to me, anyway. I've come to realize that within the community of knitters, I'm in that minority who believe in technique more than pattern. I don't need a pattern to tell me how to increase or decrease, pick up a selvedge, or even to graft an under arm. As knitters, we should already know how to do these things, and if we don't, well this is the Internet Age, isn't it? There are so many resources out there that (at least in my opinion) explicitly concise pattern writing comes off as a demonstration of over-thinking, much like the way this blog post initially started before I came to my senses, and started typing these rambling sentences. I write like I knit.




So this pullover started out, really, as a curiosity. I had always wanted to knit a sweater, but the last time I tried it, I killed the project. This time, I just happened to be knitting along on some giant thing that really didn't have a pre-determined outcome. Mainly, I was interested in seeing how the angular transitions I tend to do would translate to higher stitch counts. Once I completed it, however, I realized that this circular thing I'd just made was a perfect fit for my chest. At that point I casted on some sleeves. I wanted to use up this yarn anyway.

As things progressed, I started over-thinking things (like a shawl collar that didn't work out), trying other things, and ultimately ended up back where Zimmermann had initially led me to: a Seamless Raglan Sweater. Were there hiccups along the way? Yes. They were technical, so I looked up the answer. Was it a lot of work? Yes, especially after joining the body and sleeves into a humongous row of stitches. Did I learn something? Well, Duh.

Regardless of the size of a project, there is a constant truth: what you are knitting is a confluence of various techniques. Each technique has variations. What you decide to perform is entirely up to you. That's the beauty of handmade clothing. Research the technique, practice the craft, unify the elements. And be creative enough to make up your own mind when you have to.